“The vocation of a teacher,” said he, “is an awful one: you cannot do her real good, she will do others unspeakable harm, if she is not aware of its usefulness.” He spoke against the harm done by simply providing her with necessaries. “You may but confirm her in the notion that the training of an immortal spirit may be just as lawfully undertaken in a case of emergency as that of selling ribands.” He went on to speak with great decision about the need of a thorough education for those whose special work was “to watch closely the first utterances of infancy, the first dawnings of intelligence: how thoughts spring into acts, how acts pass into habits”. It was probably about this time that Dorothea began to see what her life-work was to be, and the noble inspiring words of this great servant of God doubtless did much to strengthen in her mind the sense of being called to high service. All through her career there is no thought more marked than that of the loftiness of a teacher’s work. From herself as well as from others of her calling she demanded that consecration of body, mind and spirit without which there can be no good work done. All who have read her “Addresses to Teachers,” and other works on teaching, realise the high level on which she placed the teacher’s calling, and the stress she laid on the need to pursue continuously impossible ideals of goodness and efficiency. “All of us have to begin and we live in the intimate consciousness of this thought: Here is a child of God committed to my care, I am to help in so developing him in time that he may be a dweller in the eternal world here and hereafter. I, too, must live an eternal life, in order that I may draw forth that consciousness in him. I must behold the Face of the Father, and so become a light to my children that, seeing the light shine in me, they may glorify that Father.”[1] [1] “Addresses to Teachers,” I, by Dorothea Beale. Queen’s College was the greatest boon to Dorothea Beale. It gave her the chance of getting first-rate teaching in Mathematics and Greek. With Mr. Astley Cook she read, privately, Trigonometry, Conic Sections, and Differential Calculus. Soon after she was asked to teach Mathematics and became the first lady Mathematical tutor. As a teacher she could, _ex officio_, go to any class she liked, and attended at different times lectures on Latin, Greek, Mental Science, and German. One of her chief friends at this time was a girl of her own age, Elizabeth Alston. The two used to study together, Elizabeth teaching Dorothea singing, whilst her friend taught her to read the New Testament in Greek. In later life she realised how much these singing lessons had done for her, enabling her to use her voice without fatigue for hours together.